You Can Help Stop Psychiatric Oppression!

If you want to know what you can do to protect yourself and your family, click here.

No, we are not $cientologists, and you will not find any $cientology-run links on this page. Please do not email us about Breggin, Szasz etc. being $cientologists. Impossible as it may seem, there are people other than $cientologists who are deeply concerned about these issues. If you have documented proof that any of the authors we are linked to are $cientologists, email us with details.

The DSM-5 is now being prepared

Misuse of Drugs, Forced Screening & Drugging of Children, Teens and Adults

Gee, this is a surprise! A Rutgers/Columbia Univ. study, paid for by the federal government instead of some drug company, found that poor children covered by Medicaid are four times more likely to be prescribed antipsychotic drugs -- often by a family physician rather than a psychiatrist. And the Medicaid children are more likely to receive the drugs for less severe conditions than their middle-class counterparts.

Even worse is the way low-income parents are told the drugs are "impossible to stop" once the children -- often as young as three -- are put on them.

How much did AstraZeneca Plc, Pfizer Inc. and Eli Lilly & Co. pay to have Seroquel, Geodon and Zyprexa found safe for children and teens?

Proposed Universal Mental Health Screening George W. Bush's New Freedom in Mental Health Commission proposes mandatory screening of preschoolers and their parents for mental illness, expanding school-based mental health programs and requiring specific treatments for specific conditions, including the use of specific medications. Parents are already being charged with child abuse for refusing to put or keep their kid on meds.

The Psycho State This letter is from Rep. Ron Paul, M.D. This is one reason a lot of people wanted to vote for him for President in 2008. More from Ron Paul on this subject

Teen Screen Exposed Even the Amen Hallelujahs don't like Teen Screen!

Psychiatrists, Children, and the Drug Industry's Role By Gardiner Harris, New York Times. A good introductory article to the issue -- but see the articles below for the real horror story.

The Rebecca Riley Story So, let's see. You have a brutally abusive father who's violating a restraining order placed on him by his wife after he molested his stepdaughter, you have his three under-12 children in daily contact with him, he's beating the crap out of his son in front of witnesses, and the kids are the ones who are diagnosed as mentally ill and are put on cocktails of antipsychotics and tranquilizers. While social workers and DCFS look the other way, because the psychiatrist had them convinced the medications and amounts were appropriate. If the youngest girl had not died, we'd never have known about this. Much more here...

Medicating Aliah By Rob Waters, from Mother Jones magazine. The psychiatric industry is altogether too enmeshed with the pharmaceutical industry, and anyone who gets close to the truth has their career destroyed. Meanwhile, children with little or nothing wrong with them are being given not just one drug, but six or eight at a time.

This is not some 1984 speculation. This is happening NOW.

The outer limits of schizophrenia treatment By Dawn McKeen. Treating children for schizophrenia before they show any signs of it? Ain't modern psychiatry great?

Psychiatric Meds Drove My Autistic Son Crazy By Ann Bauer. Be very, very careful about any doctor who says your autistic child or young adult needs to be on psychiatric medication. She doesn't mention it in this article -- we found it in 'The Body Electric' which had been carefully buried and almost unreferenced in Salon -- but the only way her son can get even partial relief is to undergo periodic electroshock therapy. Look up neuroleptic toxicity and neuroleptic malignant syndrome for some hard facts. More autism links below.

Prozac Truth Be fully informed when taking any of the new psychiatric medications, or especially putting a child or loved one on them.

Psychdata Blog reprints news articles from the U.S., England and Australia concerning the use and misuse of psychiatric drugs.

Psychiatric Drug Facts By Peter R. Breggin, M.D. What your doctor may not know about how psychiatric drugs really work, adverse drug effects on the brain and mind, the role of the FDA, drug company practices, recent medical and legal developments, electroshock and psychosurgery.

Ritalin Death: The Truth Behind ADHD A grieving father now dedicated to informing the public of the dangers of psychiatric meds. Pay particular attention to the page revealing the facts behind what so-called experts tell you about ADHD. Also check out ADHD Fraud, especially if you or your child are labeled.

Along these same lines, please read When Drug Trials Go Terribly Wrong - Lessons from a Bereaved Mother.

Drug up your kid today! This just in: Prozac is a better treatment than talking to your kid. Isn't life fabulous?!: Michael Morford talks about the medical establishment's current obsession with stuffing kids full of nerve-deadening chemicals as a solution not only to ordinary life problems, but normal child and adolescent behavior.

Click here to find out what YOU can do about these issues, to protect yourself and your family.

Psychiatry as a Tool of Social Control

Multiple Personality

Of course there really is such a thing. We're multiple, we know plenty of multiples, both trauma-based and naturally occurring groups. That doesn't mean that the psychiatric industry hasn't misused and exploited multiplicity for their own ends. Even the diagnosis called Multiple Personality Disorder/Dissociative Identity Disorder (MPD/DID) is viewed by many trauma survivors who are multiple as a disempowering insult to survivors. (scroll down, read comments from Irene)

Dangerous Therapy The Pat Burgus story. An indepth look at the Bennett Braun scandal.

Multiple Personalities and Satanic Cults This is from Mark Pendergrast's Victims of Memory and describes Judith Peterson's brutalizing "therapy".

Cult of Madness "...It was clear these doctors did to me exactly what they said my family did. They isolated me, fed me lies, and made me crazy." Some more background on Colin Ross here, with the story of Martha Hurt.

Emily's Story Therapists experiment on known multiples without their permission. Please write to us if anything like Emily's story has happened to you.

Mind Matters Review Articles on psychiatry and theories of the mind.

Anti-Psychiatry (Non-$cientology) Links

Cults, Toxic Friendships,
Malignant Narcissism

Autism

Books and Films

Title: Talking Back To Prozac: What Doctors Won't Tell You Author: Peter and Ginger Breggin Publisher: St. Martin's 1995 ISBN: 0312956061 Amazon.com sez: It's time to take a closer look at this supposedly "safe" drug. Peter Breggin picks through the studies used to justify Prozac's safety, often uncovering flaws and shoddy science. He details the FDA approval process, including who on the panel was paid by whom. The key players and the details will surprise you.

Title: They Say You're Crazy: How the World's Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who's Normal Author: Paula J. Caplan Publisher: Perseus, 1995 ISBN: 0201407582 Amazon.Com Sez: In a disturbing insider's look at how the mental health establishment decides who is normal and who is "sick," [Caplan] charges that the DSM board's decision-making process, dominated by a handful of conservative white male psychiatrists, is arbitrary, condescending, profit-driven and riddled with personal biases and political consideration. Facile labeling of personality problems, she shows, can cause personal suffering as well as material harm because DSM categories figure prominently in who wins child custody, who gets hospitalized against their will and whose psychotherapy is covered by insurance.

Title: Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism Author: Paul Collins Publisher: Bloomsbury USA ISBN: 1582343675 This book by the father of a child who may or may not be on the "spectrum" is unique among parental accounts because of its lack of tragedy. Instead of seeing his son as a victim of a horrible devastating illness, Collins refused to buy into the pronouncements of alleged experts. He saw his son's unique reading and mathematical abilities and his love of computers over people as part of what was right about the kid. His own scholarly gifts and interests in historical trivia lead him to go back in time to find individuals who may or may not have been autistic, some of them now well known like Henry Darger, some all but forgotten. Even after Collins finally lets himself get talked into believing that his son needs some kind of help to improve the social side of things, he repeatedly gives us the message that it's a mistake to try to force we autistics into so called normality. Parents of other autistic kids tell Collins about how their kid went through the pink monkey routine when they were mainstreamed, but did fine in an autistic school where they're allowed to communicate in their own way. Simply letting autistic people be autistic is such a revolutionary idea -- and we believe it is a future reality. A review of Not Even Wrong, by Jay Young If you are interested in books by autistic authors, try Amanda Baggs' Autistic Authors Booklist.

Title: The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders Author: Peter Conrad Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press ISBN: 080188585X A scholarly examination of how the psychiatric industry, in cooperation with the mass media, furthered the notion of ordinary life problems as mental diseases that require lifelong medication.

Title: The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder Author: Allan V. Horwitz Publisher: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007 ISBN: 0195313046 By accident or design, modern psychiatry doesn't do enough to distinguish between actual depressive disorders and simple feelings of sadness, grieving, or even just the blues. Like shyness, the normal feelings and behaviors associated with sadness are being pathologized. One reviewer says: "When we take a medication to make ordinary sadness go away, are we perhaps postponing our reckoning with experiences of sadness until a later time when such experiences may catch up with us?"

Title: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders Author: Herb Kutchins Publisher: Free Press, 1997 ISBN: 0684822806 Cogent information on the creation of the DSM as a political tool, mostly for the benefit of insurance companies. See also Encyclopedia of Insanity, by L.J. Davies.

Title: Shyness -- How Normal Behavior Became A Sickness Author: Christopher Lane Publisher: Yale 2007 ISBN: 0300124465 Remember the outcry when the cute little cartoons advertising Zoloft, an antidepressant (which can cause hallucinations and suicidal thoughts), were retooled to promote Zoloft's use as a medicine for social anxiety disorder? Or the Prozac commercial that magically changed the nametags at a cocktail party? First you invent the pill, right, then you invent the illness for which the pill is the cure -- you know that one. Using as his sources letters and memos written by mental health professionals, Lane builds a very convincing case for another instance of mental health industry fraud in which shy persons are told they have a mental disease. He also demonstrates how the public was fooled into thinking that these pills had been sufficiently tested and were relatively harmless.

Title: Against Therapy Author: Jeffrey Masson Publisher: Common Courage '93 ISBN: 1567510221 Please read this before opting for any kind of mainstream psychotherapy. The author begins with the premise that the aim of therapy is to change people. He then argues that if the direction of change, indeed the definition of success in therapy, is determined chiefly by the therapist, then therapy is an inherently corrupt interaction. Why? Because the autocratic structure of therapy serves the interests of the therapist, not the patient. Masson's solution is a non-authoritarian self-help group in which no money changes hands. 4/25/2002 6:58 a.m. I am really sorry about the 'Acrylic Fiber' results on this link! It has been fixed. Also by Jeffrey Masson: Final Analysis Did your shrink have to go through this? You have a right to ask'em.

Title: A Dark Science: Women, Sexuality, and Psychiatry in the Nineteenth Century Author: Jeffrey Masson Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux 1988 ISBN: 0374521239 Want to know the atmosphere and belief system in which modern psychiatry began? "Here translated for the first time are a series of shocking texts from the 19th century German psychiatric literature which, while almost completely unknown to modern readers, have had a devastating influence on attitudes toward women and children in the 20th century. The articles on the sexual "lies" and sexual "fantasies" of children were seminal, brutal and still resonate in today's literature, having taken a terrible toll on the intellectual ideas of modern psychiatry."

Title: Hidden Brutality in Child-Rearing, and the Roots of Violence Author: Dr. Alice Miller Publisher: Noonday ISBN: 0374522693 If you think you were never abused, read this book. Most people do suffer some form of brutality in childhood -- often covert, emotional or intellectual stifling -- and it does affect their thinking and feeling in later life. "It made me stronger" often simply means "it made me numb". This is not a whiny book, nor is it a Bradshaw feel-good hugfest. Child abuse exists. Don't revisit it on your kids. This book is now available in its entirety on line. Click here to read For Your Own Good in free e-text.

Title: A Brilliant Madness (American Experience) Produced by: James E. Dunford Directed by: Mark Samels Publisher: PBS Home Video 2002 ASIN: B000067S10 The real "Beautiful Mind" guy has some harsh cricitism of the Ron Howard film. This is a much better documentary of what really happened, partly narrated by Nash himself.

Title: Bedlam: Greed, Profiteering, and Fraud in a Mental Health System Gone Crazy Author: Joe Sharkey Publisher: St. Martin's 1994 ISBN: 0312104219 Based on the award-winning "Profitable Addictions" series of investigative reports by the Houston Chronicle, this book explains the classic psychiatric insurance scam by focusing on one institution, Fair Oaks Hospital in Summit, New Jersey. Amazon says: "Many in the psychiatric profession have abandoned the severely mentally ill while private, investor-owned hospitals offer bounties of up to $1500 to clergy, teachers, police and "crisis counselors" for recruiting -- one Texas legislator uses the term "body-snatching" -- troubled adults, adolescents and children covered by insurance policies that pay up to $30,000 for inpatient care. In 1993, the fraud practiced by Medicare- and Medicaid-subsidized hospital chains such as National Medical Enterprises, with 86 psychiatric hospitals and revenues of $1.74 billion in 1991, was revealed by the FBI. The psychiatric industry, Sharkey warns in this chilling, well-documented account, is lobbying for a large slice of the health reform pie and continues to "create mental illness with advertising."

Title: (Revised Edition, 1984) Author: Thomas Szasz Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 0060911514 This book is forty years old (updated in '84) and is as relevant today as the day it came out. Szasz uses clear, simple language to expose the facts behind the stigmatization of those who are different. He insists that most of the things we call mental illnesses are merely variances in normal human behaviour, or normal emotional states like loneliness or insecurity that could be helped in ordinary ways. You may not agree with everything he says, but that's not why this book is listed here.

Title: Author: Thomas Szasz Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 0815604602 Szasz restates his claims, presents his findings and explains his theories in plain language. He even gives you a bit on why he uses plain language. This book may be a better introduction than "The Myth of Mental Illness" if you've never read Szasz before. His theme is always the same: what we term mental illness is, by and large, behaviour which is explicable and reasonable given the society in which we live. Society's vigorous repression (through drugs, electroshock, etc.) of those who are different has become a form of institutionalised hate crime. We have come to regard the mental health industry as a kind of religion, as the standard against which normalcy is measured.

Title: The Medicalization of Everyday Life Author: Thomas Szasz Publisher: Syracuse Univ. Press ISBN: 0815608675 Once more, Szasz takes a look at our lives and times and how the pharmaceutical industry, in cooperation with the mainstream media and the legal system, have formed a government of social control. Medical and health decisions are made for us, "for our own good", every day. Find out what the system is doing to you and your kids -- how much of your life can you take back?

Title: Coercion as Cure, A Critical History of Psychotherapy Author: Thomas Szasz Publisher: Transaction 2007 ISBN: 0765803798 Like Masson, Szasz pulls no punches. This is what happens when we presume that a certain select group of people know more about ourselves than we do. This is not about the misuse of psychiatry; this is about the idea that psychiatry itself is a misuse of social and political power. Want more on Thomas Szasz? Visit http://www.szasz.com/.

Title: Wounded Innocents Author: Richard Wexler Publisher: Prometheus, 1995 ISBN: 0-87975-936-4 "The war against child abuse has become a war against children. In the name of "child protection" innocent families are disrupted nearly two million times every year and thousands of children are needlessly torn from their parents and thrown into foster care--even as children in real danger are ignored. While the problem of child abuse is serious and real, journalist Richard Wexler charges that our solutions to the problem have actually made it worse--in fact, hurting the very children that they were intended to help." From the Lifting the Veil review. Read about the New York City Admin. for Children's Services and what they do to families in the name of "protecting the children".

Title: Creating Hysteria Author: Joan Acocella Publisher: Jossey-Bass 1999 ISBN:: 0787947946 An expanded version of a controversial article originally written for The New Yorker in 1998. It's an excellent book, makes excellent sense, is a powerful expose of the crap that goes on in the mental health industry including the disempowerment of women, and draws entirely the wrong conclusions. We recommend that EVERYONE who is in therapy (multiple or not) read this book. Read it if you've noticed your doctor trying to dredge up questionable traumatic memories. If you feel like you're being pressed to accept a certain view of yourself, your people (if multiple), and your childhood that doesn't fit the truth that YOU know, then it's time to look for a different therapist. Many therapists DO use the tactics described in this book. Acocella may be completely mistaken in saying multiplicity doesn't exist, but she has her facts straight about what goes on in the mental health industry.

You can do something!

Making Advance Directives Work For You By Dr. Daniel Fisher. Describes the purpose of the Advance Directive legal form and how to create one. These are extremely useful for people in crisis to prevent involuntary hospitalization, restraints and drugging. Power2U is a great website if you either are mentally ill, or labeled as mentally ill.

National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy America's mental institutions are still the shame of the nation. Kids are being drugged into submission, the media convinces us that mentally ill people are dangerous and violent, and what are we going to do about it?

No Force Coalition Canadian group dedicated to eliminating force in psychiatry.

Anti-Psychiatry Coalition A nonprofit volunteer group consisting of people who feel we have been harmed by psychiatry. Many links, the truth all comes out. It's nothing but stigmatizing children, elderly people and anyone who is different, simply for profit and greed.

More on the anti-psychiatry movement here.

Association for Humane Psychiatry Don't know how genuine or effective these people are, but thought it might be worth putting up.

Unfortunately, Uncle Wayne (UnclWayn) (Le'me T'fa Cologne) and the Psychiatric Survivors Advocacy & Liberation Movement (PSALMS) are no longer with us.

Mindfreedom

The Rorschach Test The facts behind it, how to take it.

Did you know that anyone can take the MMPI and score it themselves? You can use this book: Development and Use of the Mmpi-2 Content Scales (MMPI-2 Monograph Series).

Shoshanna's Psychiatric Survivor's Guide Hasn't been updated for a while -- still contains much valuable information.

Teens' and Children's Legal Rights

Empowering website for recovery from anorexia and eating disorders. We guarantee you it's unlike anything you have ever seen before, and it is very multiple-friendly.

Are some 'crazy' things actually normal?

Did you know that hearing voices is not necessarily a sign of mental illness? People in non-western cultures have always known this, but a controversial British study has just now allowed mental health pros to begin to admit it! (Scroll down to "Finding Meaning in Voices")

Did you know that if you hear voices that bother you, talking back to them can help? Damn clever, these British people!

Embracing The Dark Voices Within More on Dr. Rufus May and his unusual sessions with people who hear voices. None of this will be any surprise to people who remember the psychiatric ideas of Freida Fromm-Reichmann (Dr. Fried of I Never Promised You A Rose Garden). Do you think things might be finally turning around?

We've had "musical hallucinations" our entire life and thought nothing of it; it's a jukebox or radio station on near-continuous, with everything from Bob Marley to bagpipe tunes. It's supposedly associated with elderly people and with hearing loss. We are slightly hard of hearing, so maybe this has something to do with it. Neil Young hears and dreams music. He's been waked up by dreams of heavy rock music and the sound of his own guitar and once dreamed an entire set of songs. Read more about 'hearing music' with a lovely Oliver Sacks story.

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Last updated... Sunday, November 15, 2009 01:07 pm

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